Lyndon Johnson Breaks Bad

It’s no slight to the other talented people involved in “All the Way” to note that a three-hour play about the Lyndon Johnson Administration would probably not have already sold out its run (through October 12th) at the American Repertory Theater, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, were it not for the presence of its lead, Bryan Cranston—or, as he is known currently, and perhaps forever, Walter White.

The play’s timing is fortuitous. The “Breaking Bad” series finale is this Sunday—hence, in part, the excitement for “All the Way,” written by Robert Schenkkan, which begins with Johnson assuming the Presidency after Kennedy’s assassination, and follows the passage of the Civil Rights Act up through Johnson’s victorious campaign against Goldwater in 1964. (During the intermission on Tuesday night, I heard chatter about the show, and about the busy life of Cranston, the acting celebrity, as in, “He was just in L.A. on Sunday night for the Emmys.”) But the play’s timing is also tricky, since it’s hard for fans of the show to not look for, and not notice, shades of Cranston’s iconic television character in his portrayal of L.B.J.

Some of the associations are merely incidental, the product of a special kind of close watching that “Breaking Bad” has inspired in these final stages. When the Johnson character refers to politics as a knife fight, I flash to Skyler and Walt, wrestling for the kitchen knife. When Johnson appears onstage in his boxer shorts, I picture Walt, way back in the first episode, his love handles drooping over an old pair of jockeys. (Cranston is thinner now than he was in those early scenes, back in 2008, and he moves around the Cambridge stage with a captivating athleticism, but his L.B.J. misses Mr. White’s old paunch.)

Other connections between the two characters are not merely the products of a mind addled by “Breaking Bad.” Lyndon Johnson and Walter White have a few things in common.

Both are ill and haunted by death.

In the play, when explaining the urgency of his political ambitions, Johnson says that all the men in his family had died young—and he was certain the same fate awaited him. Johnson himself suffered a heart attack in 1955, when he was just forty-six. He would die of another one in 1973.

Walter White’s diagnosis of lung cancer is the engine that drives the narrative arc of “Breaking Bad”—his looming death sentence helps to explain his erratic and often truly awful decisions. And Cranston’s evocation of the illness—especially the hacking, rattling cough—is a frequent reminder of the character’s fragile humanity.

Both exercise power as a bulwark against an essential insecurity.

Johnson was a tall, imposing man. In the play, Cranston leans into the visitors that come to the Oval Office, staring them down as he bends them slightly back. At one point, he grabs the actor playing Hubert Humphrey by the shirtfront and tie, imploring him to, in effect, be more of a man in his negotiations in the Senate. Yet all this physicality is showy bluster; the real Johnson lived his adult life in flight from what he feared was his own weakness. Robert Caro, in the first volume of his biography of L.B.J., writes about an argument that Johnson had during a poker game in college. A classmate challenged him to fight, and Johnson fell on his back, kicking his legs in the air. The young Johnson, a witness recalled, was “an absolute physical coward.”

Walter White, in his pre-Heisenberg days, was a picture of meekness and sad, quiet longing. Years before, he’d been cut out of what turned into a wildly profitable start-up, leaving him as an underpaid and ineffectual high-school chemistry teacher with a bad mustache and a ranch house with tacky carpeting and lousy light. All that follows—the delight that he takes in spreading menace as a notorious drug kingpin, and his self-damning need for recognition as “the one who knocks”—stems from an abiding sense of powerlessness and desperate shame.

But both think of this will to power as arising from a desire to be loved.

Cranston plays L.B.J. big: he barks, whines, guffaws, and, in a few moments of manic despair, cries, wondering why his political enemies and other human obstacles won’t simply give him the one thing he really wants: love. His Civil Rights Act will lessen the scourge of racism and help bring the South into the modern era, he says, and he’s baffled and enraged when critics on the left dismiss him as a redneck and those on the right call him a traitor. Can’t they see that the choices he’s made, the things he’s had to give up or give away, have all been for them? Alert to his despair, his wife rushes to his aid, but he most often shouts her out of the room.

Walter White’s foray into meth began as a desperate money grab for his family, protection for when he was no longer around. But that pretense didn’t last long—by the first episode, he was already marvelling at the thrill of being an outlaw (“I am awake”)—and later, after he’d gone headlong into the business, the notion that he was working for anyone but himself was a lie that only he believed. All of which makes his constant refrain—some version of “all the sacrifices that I’ve made for this family”—so hollow and false. And like Johnson’s cruelty toward Lady Bird in the play, Walter White’s love of his wife often seems more notional than real—just another emotional lever.

Both are skillful and flexible manipulators.

Johnson was a notorious braggart and bully, but he was also an adept brownnoser. It all depended on the person, and the situation. In the play, Cranston shows off the many modes of Johnson as a famed operator: he cows and demeans his staff, leads Humphrey around with a combination of threats and promises, sweet-talks Martin Luther King, Jr., and flatters his mentor and longtime political benefactor Senator Richard Russell, whom he calls uncle, before adding that, family or not, push may indeed eventually come to shove on civil rights. It was Johnson’s use of every register, from begging to demanding, that accounted for his great political victories. Vietnam, which is introduced briefly in the play—a mere mention carrying with it the historical weight of what was to come—was finally the thing that Johnson couldn’t talk his way out of.

In five seasons of “Breaking Bad,” Walter White has bounced from catastrophe to catastrophe, managing to survive largely by getting other people to do what he wants (kill rivals, not kill him) through various strategies of manipulation. He has begged on his knees, and stood over others as they begged on theirs—with everything from lying to strategic truth-telling in between. Most notably, he has bent the emotional dynamics of friendship and familial bonds—with Jesse and Skyler and Hank, and even his son, Walt, Jr. The show’s cataclysmic denouement is, in effect, Walt’s own Vietnam War—a series of escalations that have moved beyond his control.

For all of these similarities of character, the remarkable thing about “All the Way” is that we mostly manage to forget about Walter White altogether. Part of that owes to Cranston’s sharp performance, which infuses Johnson with the very un-Walter White quality of broad humor—his L.B.J. is a kind of hyper-intelligent and savvy clown.

But it also owes, I think, to how the character of Lyndon Johnson carries its own context and historical associations. When the play opens, with Cranston sitting in a plush swivel chair under a spotlight, the audience is introduced to someone that it already knows—not the television character, but the President. The play itself is an earnest retelling of a moment in history, edifying and polished, filled with the particulars of Senate procedure, vote counting, and political arm-twisting, with perhaps a few too many speeches and moments of civics-class explication in between. The stage is backed with a video screen, which shows archival footage and provides updates, from time to time, about how long a filibuster has run, or how many days remain until the election. The entire production seems intent on reminding the audience that these people were real, these things really happened. And so, while there are comparisons to be drawn between “All the Way” and “Breaking Bad”—about how escalating practical compromises can lead to a life that is, in effect, compromised—the blunt facts of history remain intact and immovable. Lyndon Johnson’s emotional pathology was not put into the service of filling a storage locker with stacks of cash or providing the Czechs with perfect azure meth, but instead went to the more noble end of shepherding an imperfect, monumentally important civil-rights bill through Congress.

Photograph by Evgenia Eliseeva/American Repertory Theater.

Ian Crouch is a contributing writer and producer for newyorker.com. He lives in Maine.